I’ve spent a lot of time – like many of you – thinking about Arsenal’s transfer window. Signing Petr Cech early in the window seemed to be a sign of great things to come. Finally, fans felt, this won’t be a “One or Two players away™” type team… Arsenal will finally compete. Instead of one or two signings, all that happened was the team being linked in one or two rumors… per day. Each a little more outlandish, a little more desperate, and a little less plausible than the last, until the team was tenuously linked with Zlatan Ibrahimović on Deadline Day. In the end, Arsenal signed no one, and fans are left with a team that many feel is one or two players away™.
Despite that opening, this piece isn’t about the transfer window. Instead, it’s about trying to decipher the mentality that could, within the same career, produce the Invincibles season of 2003-2004, the fallow period that accompanied the move to the Emirates (colloquially known as the “Banter Era”) to the current era, which has seen a pair of FA Cup wins, but no real challenge for the title. Many can think of it as the “what if” era, or the 1-2 players away™ era.
A lot has been made of Arsène Wenger during this time. People talk about his stubbornness, his penny-pinching, or that the game has simply passed him by, that he doesn’t understand the new economics of the game. I say that most of that is pretty ridiculous, as is (most likely) what I’m about to hypothesize. I don’t have any special knowledge of the situation, and I’m just giving an educated guess based on some sketchy evidence, tenuous reasoning, and a shockingly shoehorned metaphor. The difference between what I’m writing and what else has been written is only this: I’ll acknowledge it up front.
The thesis is this: Arsène Wenger is the same manager and the same mind he’s always been, and while the game has changed, I don’t think it’s done so in a way that he doesn’t fundamentally understand. Instead, I believe Arsène Wenger operates in the sporting realm with the temperament of an artist. I believe that maybe Arsène Wenger is an artist playing at football management. In particular, I think his career arc as Arsenal manager parallels (interestingly) that of Kevin Shields, the sonic architect of My Bloody Valentine. I’ll make the argument before trying to explain how it helps us understand the transfer window, then offer a sliver of optimism for the future.
My Bloody Valentine were pioneers of “shoegaze” (many critics and fans use that term pejoratively… I see it as a badge of honor). Their sound has been described (in the link above) as the merging of the “ethereal melodies” of the Cocteau Twins with crushing walls of guitar distortion, a physical assault as immutable and unstoppable as the tides. It sounded a lot like this.
We can start our comparison there. While much has been made of Arsenal’s artistic, beautiful football, Wenger’s best teams have always had a physical edge in the mold of a Patrick Viera type, the same type many Gooners pine for currently. If Arsenal’s balance has been lost in the last decade, they have veered too much toward the Cocteau Twins and away from the crushing guitars as a counterbalance.
We can think of Arsène’s pre-Arsenal career in the same vein as the early MBV catalog, a preamble. At the time, while seen as a talented band capable of its moments, no one expected the pair of records they produced in 1988 (Isn’t Anything) and 1991 (Loveless). We can think of Arsène’s first few seasons with Arsenal as the period surrounding Isn’t Anything, in that it laid the foundation of what was to come. Wenger’s Arsenal teams won the Double in 1998 and 2002. While both remain remarkable achievements, neither was unprecedented or particularly groundbreaking. They were excellent seasons, as Isn’t Anything an excellent record. However, if that was the end of the story, it would merely be a nice footnote, a couple of good years, a one-album wonder.
Then came Loveless; then came the Invincibles. In 1991, My Bloody Valentine released a record that crashed a record company, fulfilled Isn’t Anything’s promise to build an enduring sonic movement, and inspired nearly every band your local hipster has loved for the past 2 decades. Meanwhile, Arsenal went through an entire Premier League campaign unbeaten, a feat not seen in nearly a century. As Loveless was perhaps once-in-a-century record (hyperbole? Okay, once in a generation… within a certain subculture), the Invincibles was, literally, a once in a century team, and the club and Wenger has lived in its shadow since, much like Kevin Shields has lived in the shadow of Loveless.
Imagine knowing what transcendence feels like, to experience it, and to have to come back down to the muck. Imagine having to answer to fans after what you had accomplished; answerable to people who could never hope to experience what you had authored. Imagine what you would do to achieve it again, the lengths you would go to, and the compromises you wouldn’t make, because there is no shortcut to history.
After the release of Loveless, MBV went practically dormant for 12 years. After the Invincibles season, Arsenal went trophyless for nine years. It’s not like during that time Kevin Shields wasn’t writing and recording or, more aptly, forgotten how to write or record music. At the same time, I don’t think Arsène Wenger has forgotten how to do this job. It’s just that good enough was nowhere near good enough anymore.
In the interim, MBV broke up, its members dispersed around the globe to pursue other projects, and Shields himself adopted a hermetism that brought rather unfavorable comparisons to such mercurial artists as Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys. Sound familiar? At least Arsène Wenger had the excuse of trying to lead the team through the financing of a new stadium. But he faced some of the same problems: player departures and trips to the transfer market that might have been best left unmade.
And therein lies the crucial difference: sports clubs don’t take seasons off, a privilege that artists have. Rumour has it that Kevin Shields had at least two albums of material that he scrapped rather than release because it didn’t capture the sound he was looking for. They weren’t up to par. They weren’t MBV standard.
Wenger, however, had to field a team, often consisting of a number of players fans thought weren’t up to Arsenal standard. How many of us think at times he would have rather taken the season off to perfect his project? I’m thinking more than once. Without that privilege, he has continually fielded sub par teams.
However, there is hope for the Gunners if the MBV parallel has any legs (and why wouldn’t it? You got a better theory?). In 2007, MBV reunited for a series of shows including the Coachella music festival. Additionally, at that time Shields made claims – that seemed outrageous at the time – that the long-awaited third MBV record, which he had worked on since 1996, was close to completion. Most fans hoped against hope that it was true, but most never really believed it. The time had passed. The music industry and sonic template for quality records had certainly passed Shields by. In 2013, the album (m b v) finally came out…. It sounded very much in tune with the sound the band had perfected in 1991. Yet, despite well-grounded fears of cynical fans, it was good. It was really, really good. Shields had accomplished the nigh-impossible. He made an album true to his vision and his standards, recorded it, and released it to critical and fan acclaim. It wasn’t Loveless, but good enough was finally good enough again.
It seems that, in my Wenger-Shields parallel, Gooners are somewhere in the period between 2007 and 2013, but that there is light at the end of the tunnel. Let’s treat the back-to-back FA Cup wins as the reunion shows, and this transfer window as the delays between those shows and the third MBV record, and we can see what logically comes next, and why I’m so optimistic about Arsenal’s near and mid-range future.
Unlike Shields, Wenger has to keep fielding a team year after year. But, like Shields, he will not compromise his vision. He will not accept a player that does not fit his vision for his next magnum opus. He’s done that for years, and no one was satisfied with the results. Only he didn’t have the artist’s prerogative of shelving the results. He was still forced to put them out there for public consumption and dissection. the fans saw, and weren’t satisfied.
You may call it stubbornness, and you may even be right. But when you’ve seen transcendence, when you’ve authored an unbeaten season, when you’ve written Loveless, how could you be satisfied with anything less ever again? Is it not better to fail while striving than to fail while compromising? And make no mistake, I think Arsène does not see winning as an end in and of itself, but a by-product of the process by which he puts together a team, mainly according to his aesthetic tastes and theories of how a football team is to be constructed and coached.
If he’s truly 1-2 songs away from another Loveless, I can’t imagine that Wenger would care to take a shortcut to the end. All killer, no filler isn’t just a cliché for some artists… it’s a way of life (which is also a cliché). If Gooners are lucky, they can still get an m b v which, while no Loveless, was still finally good enough for Shields, and probably more than most fans expected or deserved.
